Identification of Data Representation Needs in Service Design

Organisations are looking for new service offers through innovative use of data, often through a Service Design approach. However, current Service Design tools conceal technological aspects of service development like data and datasets. Data can support the design of future services but is often not represented or rendered as a readily workable design material. This paper reports on an early qualitative study of the tools used to work with data and analytics in a medium-sized organisation. The findings identify the current representations of data and data analytics used in the case organisation. We discuss to which extend the available representations of data and data analytics support data-driven service innovation. A comparison of our findings and current Service Design representations show that Service Design lack to represent data as design material. We propose the notion of expansiveness as a criterion to evaluate future data representations for data-driven Service Design

Smart Technology and the Emergence of Algorithmic Bureaucracy:Artificial Intelligence in UK Local Authorities

In recent years, local authorities in the UK have begun to adopt a variety of ‘smart’ technological changes to enhance service delivery. These changes are producing profound impacts on the structure of public administration. Focusing on the particular case of artificial intelligence, specifically autonomous agents and predictive analytics, a combination of desk research, a survey questionnaire, and interviews were used to better understand the extent and nature of these changes in local government. Findings suggest that local authorities are beginning to adopt smart technologies and that these technologies are having an unanticipated impact on how public administrators and computational algorithms become imbricated in the delivery of public services. This imbrication is described as algorithmic bureaucracy and it provides a framework within which to explore how these technologies transform both the socio‐technical relationship between workers and their tools, as well as the ways that work is organized in the public sector